If Dreaming Were An Olympic Sport

Last night and the night before I had vivid dreams in which I was running.

It was lovely. It felt so easy and natural.

In the first dream I was surprised – I knew that MS hadn’t let me do this for years. I haven’t even had any remission of any symptoms since well before 2007 and here I was running.

And it’s easy to run. You just tilt your body in the direction of travel and move one leg forward to stop yourself falling, followed by the other leg, then the first and so on.

Bizarrely, my mother was in the building I was running into. I went to find her to tell her the good news. There’s surely a couple of dissertations there for the Freudians.

In my next dream, I remembered the first one and that it had turned out to be just a dream. Here I was running to get into a utility vehicle that I had hired. “So I can actually run after all,” I thought to myself.

There was a stow-away under a tarpaulin in the back of the van. I told him I was going to Crouch End but he was welcome to stay in the back if he wanted. He told me that it was illegal to carry someone in this way so I told him I hadn’t seen him. I got in the van and started to drive away whereupon I awoke.

What does all this mean? Who knows? At least there’s a bunch of neurons somewhere in my head that have remembered how to run. Maybe? … no, I can’t think like that.

But a happy pair of dreams anyway and I hope all of our good dreams come true.

3 comments on “If Dreaming Were An Olympic Sport”

I’ve had the running dreams, too. There is probably an equal mix of remembrance and longing lodged in the subconscious and it manifests itself with these dreams. You are correct: They are lovely and the effort to run in them is so easy and natural. Then you wake up and reality hits you like a hammer. Maybe these dreams are a defense mechanism the mind uses to relieve the mental stress that comes with dealing with our daily reality. A special kind of escapism neurons, perhaps?